For those that don’t know here in Australia where I live the Australian Government recently passed metadata retention laws that basically force ISP’s to hold their customer data for up to two years. This allows Government agencies to access this data very easily.
With something like Maidsafe, does this mean that things like metadata retention become obsolete?
Yes, no unencrypted metadata is available. Store to attempt to later decrypt would be very difficult and should be impossible, but never us that word in security 
You. I like you. Heh
The government is talking about “requiring” the storers of the data to keep it and make it available (presumably unencrypted) - I haven’t kept up with the latest readings of the legislation but it is not a good thing . . maybe Maidsafe will be “illegal” technology . .
maybe Maidsafe will be “illegal” technology
I’d like to see some examples of technology that has been successfully outlawed please. And the miserable failures too
Exactly - but we are talking about real troglodytes running the country at the moment. I am hoping that the Maidsafe system will just allow us to sweep a lot of that crap aside . .
I’m not suggesting otherwise. They may outlaw technologies… my point is that it doesn’t work. Hence my challenge!
The law requires providing the keys to decrypt (or decrypt for them) the data or face jail. Up to 6 months if I remember correctly.
If one was to use multiple vaults then how are the authorities to know since its all encrypted and only they should know that. EDIT: is vault correct word, or user logins?
This is not entirely correct. A lot of the meta data is ISP generated, like IP/Port src/dst address, time of day, location of device, name/address/phone of customer. These data sets are not masked.
But what SAFE will do is hide the type of communication, real type of data etc.
The effect of using SAFE will be to massively increase the generate/collected/retained meta data that the ISP has to record and it will have very little value to the government agencies and/or civil litigants ability to use discovered data. Assuming that the person makes a lot of use of SAFE.
Yes I agree, there is this for sure. The trick is to make it invalid, so make if difficult to connect the dots with. So they know you connected to a node in another country, but need the other country to have the info their end to and share it. Agree though there is a load of implicit data in any communication, that should not be ignored. Gret to pick up on that, cheers @neo